Earlier this semester I spoke with a friend back home in Virginia who was working in the field with a Transgender activist. During the interview my friend accidentally slipped up and called her by the wrong pronoun: he. Immediately he knew he messed up and was prepared to apologize when she “blew up” and began slinging a slew of curses about his disrespect to her personhood. The interview stopped to allow everyone to return to a calm enough state to continue, with my friend taking a less active role for a teammate to continue the main questions.

Immediately I thought, should this be the proper response for such a situation? This person who is transgendered has probably spent her entire life being called by the wrong gender and I’m sure it’s very traumatic as all the past events have built up. As such I don’t feel she was in the wrong to be this upset, especially when she was supposed to be a in a situation where something like this shouldn’t happen: an interview about the perspective of being transgendered. In these “safe spaces,” like our academic gender studies class, there is a certain decorum to learning how to say and do things to be respectful to everyone across the gender spectrum.

However, we have to remember this is not how “the real world” behaves or reacts. People are taught to see the world as a gender binary and realize the personal characteristics that make someone look like a male or a female. While a trained person will recognize an transgender women, the rest of the world sees a man in a dress. While we can educate each other to learn to see otherwise, we have to be patient and realize that most people aren’t used to it yet. It hasn’t developed in the vocabulary. It’ll take time. When someone starts to yell it immediately puts people in defensive mode and emotions will flare. While my friend is respectful, many will not be and it can only put them off to be yelled at. This doesn’t make the community look good and people unlike my friend will come away from the experience remembering that he was chastised for his ignorance and maybe nothing else. Perhaps a calmer, but still stern comment is all it should take to set someone “straight?” Education is key.

As I was helping my six year old brother with his homework this weekend, I realized with startling clarity that his basic math worksheets really weren’t basic at all. I’d bet that you probably don’t remember your 1st grade homework, but if your assignments looked anything like his do, you probably spent a good deal of time trying to figure out which one “didn’t belong.”

As we’re going through one particular sheet, he comes to a set of pictures and instead of quickly determining which one was “different,” he looked at me with a questioning expression and said: “Mika, these are all the same…?”

He was starting fixedly at a picture of an apple, orange, peach, and banana. This was the last and most difficult question on the page because they are all the same in that they’re fruit. But, the correct answer was clearly the banana since its shape is significantly different from that of the other three. I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of his dilema with the fruit picture if I hadn’t just finished reading Michele Foucault’s lecture on (ab)normality. While Foucault discusses the concept of abnormality in the context of the human body and “hermaphrodites,” the link between his lecture and this simple homework problem was obvious to me.

We’re still teaching our children to quickly, almost reflexively, decide which member of a group “doesn’t belong.” This wouldn’t be such an issue if a negative connotation weren’t almost inevitably attached to being different. Practically everyone is guilty here… even Sesame Street!

I realize that categorization and differentiation are critical skills, but it just makes me wonder what deeper lessons I’m teaching my brother if I make him single out the banana just because it looks a little different. This is a little overdramatic, but is he going to go to school and shy away from a child of a different ethnicity because he’s worried that this child is the metaphorical banana? Or, what if my brother feels like the banana for whatever reason? Is he going to be afraid to play with the apples and oranges?

I found this whole situation interesting because as I was reading Foucault (prior to the homework episode), I found myself wondering how so long ago they came to the conclusion that someone had broken the “cosmic law” or was a “monster” just because their genitals looked different, and how even today we still sometimes think in a similar way. Even after finishing the piece I’m still not sure where they got the idea that it is somehow OK to pass judgments on the entirety of a person just by looking at one physical characteristic. I mean, think about it… What if people with green eyes were “abnormal”, problematic monsters who violated the proper working of the universe? Where would we be then?

In the end, I simply explained to my brother the reason that circling the banana would be the correct option. Of course, this was only one small homework assignment and I have far more confidence in my ability to share the right messages with him than apprehension about what stereotypes and detrimental lessons he might learn in first grade. I suppose the point here is that we can do anything and everything to try to teach children that we shouldn’t be mean to Johnny just because his skin is different or make fun of Katie because she has two daddies, but there are still so many forces counteracting this effort; most of which we likely don’t even notice.

After reading Andre Lorde’s Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, I have come to realize that being an example for others should not have a negative connotation. Yes, we all make mistakes and we went examples of how not to act, but that is not what I am referring to. I am referring to education others based on our differences. Have you ever been in a classroom where the teacher looks at you when he or she is talking about a minority group that you fall into? I have and it makes me uncomfortable. I do not want to be but on the stop about something just because I am the token hispanic gay guy, but Lorde has made me realize that I need to take advantage of these opportunities. Lorde sets herself apart from other black lesbians because she speaks her mind and she expresses her sexuality even though she knows other African American women are less likely to be open about their sexuality. Throughout Lorde’s article she argues that we have to recognize our differences so we can work together to identify those differences and work together within our minority groups and with other minority groups. I believe what she is saying is that together we can all make a difference if we acknowledge one another’s differences by educating. I have always shied away from being an example just because I was different and those teachers that looked at me every time we were discussing sexuality or minorities were the teachers I disliked the most. We should let people feel comfortable being an example, we should not force them to be an example. I have attached this article from the Learning and Teaching website because it reminded me of Lorde’s article of how educators should be inclusive to their student’s differences. Lorde wants women to unite to be more powerful, but why stop at one minority group? If we all took her advice and applied it to ourselves we would not have to worry about others calling on us to be examples, we would voluntarily do so with the support of others.